


One Screwed Pooch Spoils the Whole Game

by saddle_tramp



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Humor, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-26
Updated: 2011-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saddle_tramp/pseuds/saddle_tramp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rating: PG-13 for language<br/>Spoilers:  General series spoilers only. If you know who everyone is, you’re good.</p><p>Summary: Danny gets a little something from ‘Secret Santa’.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Screwed Pooch Spoils the Whole Game

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: [Sutlers on DW](http://sutlers.dreamwidth.org/) posted an excerpt from a book about the history of the Navy Seals (‘Brave Men, Dark Waters’, by Orr Kelly), [here](http://sutlers.dreamwidth.org/10852.html). I read that, and then (after I finally quit laughing) this story just kind of happened. I blame it totally on the insanity of Seals, past and present, and on Sutlers for sharing proof of that insanity where I could find it.
> 
> Also, I titled this at 4 AM one night, which was when I finished editing it, so yeah. If the title sucks – and at this point I can’t even tell anymore – then that’s why. :-D

 

Danny flipped open the book he’d gotten from ‘Secret Santa’ as he wondered just who Steve thought he was kidding. It was pretty obvious that Steve had given it to him. No one _else_ was constantly giving him shit about saying Steve was in the Army, and Chin and Kono weren't under the mistaken impression that Danny wanted to get to know Seals in general.

Danny knew very well that Steve had been in the Navy, of course, but sometimes he really _needed_ to push Steve’s buttons in order to keep his own sanity intact, relatively speaking. Steve seemed to know where every one of Danny’s buttons was located, and his favorite hobby – besides stripping down and getting wet – seemed to be to poke and prod at _every one of them_ as often as humanly possible. For a normal human being that might have been easier to tolerate, but Steve wasn’t at all normal and made it his business to be exceptional at all of his hobbies.

Danny had always thought Rachel was talented at making him crazy, but Steve made her look like a rank amateur. Thankfully, Steve’s response to Danny yelling at him was completely different from Rachel’s. Steve hadn’t ever thrown a vase at him hard enough to knock him out, and he hadn’t grabbed Danny’s clothes and thrown them out in the street screaming he wanted a divorce (Rachel had done that about once a week those last two months, until he got fed up and started the paperwork himself.), so Danny was calling whatever it was he and Steve had going on an improvement.

Danny hadn’t gotten laid half the time when he was married to Rachel anyway, so not having sex with Steve wasn’t really all that different, though the way he was starting to think of Steve as more than his partner made him a little uncomfortable with the fact that he had punched Steve several times. He didn’t like thinking about all the times he had wantedto punch Rachel either, though he was still proud that he had never actually done it. She had a mean right hook that she had never been shy about using on _him_ when she was too angry to form words, something that had occurred fairly often near the end, but Danny had always managed to resist the urge to hit her. Well, unless you counted the time he put her over his knee and spanked her, but in his defense he had ended up getting _stitches_ that night for the gash on his head where she had hit him with a vase before he snapped, so he thought she had deserved it.

Danny couldn’t say he had never punched Steve, and in fact didn’t regret hitting him, even though Steve had made such a fool of him every time that he wasn’t really sure it was worth it. Steve knew all kinds of jujitsu crap he had picked up from the freaks (And as far as Danny was concerned they _had_ to be freaks to have produced that asshole Taylor, not to mention _Steve_ , who was quite simply insane, just not in the monumentally fucked up turn-on-even-your-best-friend-to-get-what-you-want way Taylor had been.) that the government had training their pet attack Seals, and he often reacted to being hit before he stopped to think about _who_ had hit him. He had apologized each time as soon as he realized what he had done, but that didn’t stop him from pinning Danny face-first against a wall or the hood of the Camaro the next time Danny lost his patience completely and punched him.

Steve had actually seemed _embarrassed_ by the way he reacted when Danny punched him, even though he hadn’t actually ever hurt Danny, except for that one time about a month ago that Danny had managed to twist his bad knee somehow when Steve pinned him. Danny hadn’t punched Steve since then, though, so he thought he was making progress on controlling his temper. He had wanted to – God, how he wanted to, almost _every day_ – but he had restrained himself because the satisfaction of punching Steve, while nice, didn’t really make up for how _stupid_ Danny felt when Steve accidentally made him look like a complete fool afterwards.

Danny noticed that the book had fallen open to a particular page and he started reading curiously, his eyebrows going up more the farther he got.

 _“We wanted to determine how fast the helicopter could fly and still have the swimmer enter the water in workable condition. We kept increasing the speed. People would skip like a stone across the water. That was a little too fast. In the first group of tests, we had all our gear on: swim fins, masks, knives, explosives. When we hit the water, naturally it tore everything off. So we made a pack of equipment, with a flotation bladder. The guy had a knife on his leg, that was about it. He’d go in holding his nose and his ass. We’d drop equipment at the same time in a flotation device._

 _We spent a lot of time developing that technique. How high should the helicopter be? How fast should it go so the swimmer hit the water in a reasonable fashion? What kind of angles should the person take? Most of the momentum was forward rather than down. We were flying about twenty feet at twenty-five to thirty knots. We developed a pretty good technique for getting a person in the water._

    _Then we had this idea of picking them up. We were already trained in boat pickup. The swimmer puts his arm up, the guy catches him with the rubber loop, flips him onto the boat like a fish. Well, we figured we’d get a rubber loop on a ladder. We’ll attach the ladder with bungee springs to the helicopter so it has some spring to it. The chopper will come along dragging this loop. The guy will do his thing, climb up the ladder into the helicopter._

 _It was a disaster. Just as he was going to get the loop, it would hit a wave and bounce right over him. Or he’d get the loop and he’d get about halfway up the ladder and the next man would hit the loop and it would fire the fellow who was on the ladder right off, like a bow and arrow. We tried for a long time to find ways to make it work. We never really did get a way that would work except having the ladder just hang there and have the guy climb up._

 _That was the first concept of UDT getting airborne. We were also talking to the Korean air force about getting our people jump training. And some of our people did jump out of Korean airplanes, mostly because they wanted to get the little Korean wings. Then somebody broke a leg, and we weren’t allowed to do it anymore.”_

Danny snickered, and then he had the sudden _vivid_ mental image of Steve pouting like a four-year-old and muttering about how some _haole_ asshole had screwed the pooch and now nobody got to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, and he really started laughing. He was just getting control of himself again when Steve suddenly walked into his office, looking kind of amused.

“What’s so funny?” Steve asked, stopping on the other side of Danny’s desk.

“You!” Danny said, and laughing again. “You Seals are all just _insane_ , you do realize that, right?”

Steve blinked and looked a little bemused. “Sitting in my office drinking my coffee is insane?”

Danny pushed the book across the desk, pointing to the last few paragraphs he’d read. “No, you were actually behaving yourself for a change, but that right there? That is funny as hell and reminded me of you.”

Steve looked down, reading the paragraph, and then snorted and muttered, “Had to be a _haole_.”

Danny burst out laughing again, and the dirty look Steve gave him didn’t help any at all. Steve looked kind of offended at first, but that quickly faded into a pout that just made Danny laugh harder even though it was starting to hurt.

“Ow,” Danny gasped, still laughing as he clutched at the ribs he’d separated in a fight – naturally one Steve had started with a couple of goons that made _Steve_ look tiny – less than a week ago. They weren’t quite as healed as Danny liked to pretend they were, and evidently laughing his head off wasn’t something he was supposed to be doing, because the more he laughed, the worse it hurt. “Oh, damn that hurts.” He laughed again. “Ow.”

Chin walked into Danny’s office then with Kono right behind him, looking at Danny for a moment before he turned his attention to Steve. “What’s the joke?”

Steve snorted and gave Danny a dirty look. “Ask him.” He turned and stalked out of Danny’s office, his back ramrod straight as he added, “I’m going to order lunch. Anyone got any objections to pizza?”

Danny was still breathing hard and holding his side, but he managed to get control of himself enough to say, “Don’t get pineapple on it!”

Steve flipped him off without even looking back, making Kono giggle as Chin gave Danny a bemused look. “C’mon, brah. Share with the class. What was so funny?”

Danny grinned widely at Chin, rubbing his side as he pointed to the still-open book. “Just, read that page.”

Chin looked bemused as he moved closer to Danny’s desk to read, but soon his lips were twitching in amusement. He looked up as he finished. “Okay. And you were reading a book about early Navy Seals because...?”

“Because,“ Danny did air quotes around the next to two words, smirking, “‘ _Secret Santa_ ’ gave it to me. Evidently he wants me to learn more about Seals, as if I don’t spend ninety percent of my waking hours with one.” He gestured to the book again, grinning, “That bit about the guy breaking his leg and ending the whole Korean paratrooper training thing made me think of Steve, and how he’d be _sure_ to blame it on a stupid _haole_ messing it up for everyone else.” He grinned even wider. “And then when Steve walked in and I had him read it, _he did_.” Kono started giggling, one hand over her mouth, and Danny nodded, grinning at her. “See, _Kono_ gets the humor!”

Chin’s lips twitched, and then he started snickering too.

Steve stepped into the doorway again, pouting and looking sullen as he muttered, “I hate you all.”

Danny couldn’t help it as he started laughing again, but at least he wasn’t the only one that time.

Kono and Chin were laughing just as loud and just as hard as Danny was.

 

 

~ End


End file.
